Sometimes I don't mind cheap chinesium. I just bought a pack of 60 dinner forks because my kids inexplicably loose dinner forks. I don't care about Bokon, Tinnin, ZXVFY, or whatever made up brand it is. I know I'm buying cheap chinese stuff. If I was buying life-safety equipment, well, Amazon might not be the place to start anyway.

The 2000 settlement with Microsoft was right in time for Caldera to take the $280 million, buy SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) assets, rename itself "The SCO Group", which it then leveraged in the infamous 2003 SCO vs IBM lawsuit claiming Linux infringed the SCO-licensed (but Novell owned since 1993) AT&T copyrights. Caldera's (aka The SCO Group's) lawsuit collasped when it was revealed that SCO did not own the AT&T Unix copyrights, but that AT&T had sold them to Novell and Novell had merely licensed them to SCO.

I am a government contracting officer for 22 years and more than 34 years government service. The article is FUD. Pure disinformation. SAM.gov (System for Award Management) has been around for 14 years at least. The goal is to centralize all contracting information systems to make it easier to find stuff. Many different systems are gradually being integrated over a long period. It was first rolled out to replace the Central Contractor Registration at least as far back as 2012. Then it integrated Federal Business Opportunities (FedBizOpps was where RFPs were posted) in 2018-2019. RFPs are now posted at SAM.gov. Since then CPARS, PPIRS, and FAPIIS (past performance tracking) have been rolled in a few years back. They are in the process of integrating eSRS (small business usage reporting) right now. In some cases SAM is a new implementation (like replacement of FedBizOpps) and in others, it is merely a link to take you to the old system (like CPARS) which still exists but no longer have their old homepage. I will admit SAM.gov is clunky, but that is more a function of trying to unify a gazillion different systems with incompatible data formats into anything coherent using the lowest bidder IT contractor.

If the US market is not open, then where does Canada think it will sell these EVs? Their internal market is limited (40M population - about the size of California). EU will not take imports of automobiles (but will happily sell you their own Audis or Mercedes). Korea and Japan do not accept foreign autos. The rest of the world is flooded with cheap BYD EVs. Beyond Carney's bravado and posturing of standing up to Trump, Canada's better interest is to reconcile with the USA.

Which makes me fear for civilization. Think of all the knowledge that will be lost when the 'digital' media (tapes, CDs, magnetic HDDs) is either degraded or the tech is so old we can no longer access it with current formats or machines. I know there is some 'archival' quality CDs, but they are few and far between. Few digital records are on 'archive' quality media.

WTF? Nobody needs this in a text editor.

At some point, the cost trade off has to be considered. We can save lots of lives and make traffic accidents nil if we make car unaffordable. But how does this affect poor people's ability to get to work or go on with their lives. For the lefties out there, stop focusing on Trump and corporations and consider the negative impact on marginalized communities if cars are unaffordable to buy, operate, and maintain.

Remember when the "information economy" crowd told the laid-off factory workers to "learn to code". Ha ha. Now it's their turn to "learn to code". Turns out karma is a bitch.

So this is where the Duke Nuke'em Forever team went.....

Doch! Grundapfel!

So instead of a gradual rise that coastal dwellers can manage and adapt to over years, they are going to risk a catastrophic instant failure with massive sudden flooding?

NBCUniversal should cut them some slack and work out a payment deal or forebear for awhile. If they force Redbox into bankruptcy, they would probably get pennies on the dollar in a bankruptcy settlement and the revenue stream would be permanently gone. This is the classic golden goose case.

I've only ever seen GSA approved containers use old-style rotery dial locks; never seen anything electronic.

There is no such thing as a secure electronic system. All electronic systems can be hacked or back-doored. "But I audited the opensource code", you say? Did you see what is hardwired or hardcoded in all the chips? No? Then it is not secure. Also, many, if not most, affordable electronic locks can be defeated with a magnet becuse they usually work on a solenoid.

The problem with java is the 'conventions' that have arisen on how to use it. The convention in Java is to encourage over-abstraction to the point of absurdity. When you download and look at any project, you must spend considerable time trying to detangle and understand the thousands of lines of spaghetti abstract interfaces and 'helper' classes. It is a huge cognitive load.

There is a joke hello world at http://foreigndispatches.typep... that really isn't far from the truth about how java programs are actually implemented by some coders. I seems some java coders think: Why just print a string when you could instead instantiate a new string-writer class implementing an abstract string writer factory with a text-writer interface? And instead of hardcoding a constant value, use an xml or json configuration file, even if you will never actually change the value.